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Saturday, November 5, 2011

Zombies!!! review and AAR

So I played a game of Zombies!!! with
my kids the other day and I have to say it was fun. I had seen
reviews of it at Zombie
Place, Board
Game Geek, and The
Man Cave; and I really wanted to try it out myself. I also wanted
to have a look at the figures for possible use in an ATZ campaign.

I paid about $26 after taxes and a
member discount from Barnes & Noble. The box is small, but it
comes with a fair amount of stuff. Map tile cards, event cards, dice,
counters and figures. The rules are fairly simple. Roll to move and
kill zombies on a 4+ roll.

The tiles consist of streets and
buildings, but you can only enter named buildings to search for lives
or ammo. Your ultimate goal is to make it to the helicopter pad and
safety. Each turn consists of drawing and placing a map tile, rolling
to move, combating any zombies you share a square with, rolling for
the number of zombies you can move. At any time during your turn you
can play an event card, each player starts with and maintains a hand
of three.

I played this game with my son (almost
6) and daughter (8) so we had to fudge a few things to keep the game
moving. First off we displayed our event cards. My son can't really
read yet and I knew that if I played any zombie attack or
disadvantage type cards on him he would get upset. So the upshot was
that my daughter was the only one who played event cards and she only
really used the chainsaw. We also allowed players to keep their
zombie kill total even if they got killed and had to return to the
town square.

Being the youngest, my son went first.
He immediately took off for the nearest building, intent on slaying
zombies. My daughter sort of ambled around and I went for the ammo in
the police station. I won't give you the blow by blow, partly because
I can't remember it, but just the flavor of the game progress. My son
basically just wanted to kill zombies. Being in his misogynistic
phase (boys vs. girls) he wanted to kill female zombies so that
dictated his movements somewhat. My daughter seemed to be wandering
aimlessly around, but she did enter the lawn and garden shop with the
express purpose of getting and using the chainsaw. I made quick work
of the zombies in the police station and then headed toward the
buildings in the upper left, mostly looking for more ammo. Zombie
movement was not really an issue. I moved zombies out of my way, my
son wanted to only move male zombies and it seemed completely random,
and my daughter moved zombies in ways that baffled me but seemed to
make sense to her.

So when the helicopter pad was finally
played, wouldn't you know it, I was on the complete opposite side of
the table. We all headed in that direction, me shuffling along like a
zombie with a succession of 1's, my son getting killed because he
wasted his ammo on crap rolls instead of losing a life, and my
daughter pretty much unscathed all the way to the pad. The long and
short of it is my daughter got killed fighting a zombie on the pad,
my son had also been sent back to the main square a couple of times,
and the old man got hot on the dice and strolled into the center
square of the helicopter pad winning the game. There were a few
tears, so we placed everyone at the pad and then commenced the body
count. Daughter: 20, Son: 19, Me: 8.

Personally I think that zombie
avoidance is the way to go. And lastly I broke out a scale comparison
chart and put the zombie figures next to some IMEX WW2 figures from
the Billy V set. As you can see the US Rifleman stands at 25mm and
the zombies appear to be about 27mm. So apparently the zombie virus
causes gigantism before it animates your corpse. So not perfect, but
it'll do.

So I'd give the game overall a thumbs up. Easy rules, fairly quick to play and a decent value. You can get 100 zombies for $10 but I feel like the extra $15-$20 for the game is worth it. And the plus side is I don't have to play Monopoly ad nauseum with the kids.